


We Were Born In The Shadow, Of The Crimes Of Our Fathers (Blood Was Our Inheritance. No, We Did Not Ask For This)

by Itssilverbrich



Series: Crown of Ice [2]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Hybrid discrimination, Hybrids, King Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF), Philza shows near the end, Three Life System, Video Game Mechanics, Worldbuilding, listen this was just an excuse to worldbuild and give my minesona a backstory, related to Waiting For Love but can be read alone, shut up its 2021 im probably gonna die young lemme have this, this is before Tommys adoption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-07
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:22:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,571
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29258901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Itssilverbrich/pseuds/Itssilverbrich
Summary: A few years before Philza Minecraft takes the throne, a young Red Panda Player named Red writes the stories she hears.
Relationships: Original Character & Original Character
Series: Crown of Ice [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2148603
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	We Were Born In The Shadow, Of The Crimes Of Our Fathers (Blood Was Our Inheritance. No, We Did Not Ask For This)

**Author's Note:**

> Wait, youre actually reading this? bro. bro i am going to kiss you so hard, bro. it doesnt have to be romantic, it can be i would die for you platonically kiss.  
> anyway i would die for you enjoy my self indulgence

There are two ways for a player to be brought into the world.   
  
There is the way most know how it works; two people loving each other and having a child.   
There is also the unexplained but equally accepted way.   
  
Spawning.   
No one is sure how it works. Some think players are souls cast down in disgrace. Others think players are dreamers of another world. Some think players are an extension of the universe itself, loving, exploring, and discovering itself.   
  
Red spawned a Red Panda Player, a rare passive mob hybrid, about five years old. She spawned with nothing but her teeth, her fur, and her anxious but bright smile.   
The world she spawned into thought she was a Red Fox at first before they noticed her marking and the lack of any sort of fear of players that Fox Players possessed when spawned.   
She did not have a name when she spawned, she was given it out of need to call her something when she wasn’t focusing in class.   
  
Every child was required to go to school, ages 5 to 12, hybrid or otherwise. Red was given a name, a sweater, a pencil and paper, and was told to go to work.   
She did her best but she heard whispers, from her classmates, from her teachers, from her neighbors, from the walls around her.   
There were so many stories to be told and she heard all of them.   
  
Red was booted out when she turned 12, the boarding school slamming the door on her and her few possessions. She had expected it but hearing the others given a day to celebrate their birthdays while she had to check her journal for bent pages hurt.   
She quickly got a job at the local library, the owner a kind older man who did not possess the same wariness the rest of the server had towards her and her ‘kind’.   
  
Hybrid players weren’t out right discriminated against at the moment but they generally weren’t accepted, especially if they were hostile. Many usually left their spawn worlds to find greener pastures. She had been lucky to be a passive mob, much less such a chill and friendly one. That came with its fair shares of issues, including being babied and considered stupid for most of her life, but she made it work, just like any hybrid player.   
There weren’t many hybrid players on this world, not as many as, say, the original Arctic Empire world, but there were a few.   
There was Mrs. Thatcher and B. Licious, a lovely creeper-ghast hybrid couple. Mrs. Thatcher was an excellent singer, hissing out her s’s as she hummed. B. Licious always cried at sad stories.   
Red knew the two were expecting a kid soon and she hoped the child’s story would be something worth hearing.   
Maybe the two would leave this world, or kingdom if you wanted to be fancy, for one not under Arctic jurisdiction.   
She hoped so.   
  
The book store owner was good friends with Mr. Licious and the stories their friendship carried made the walls sing with it so she would be sad to see him go but they were two hostile mobs having a child in a world where raising a hybrid child came with more difficulties than it should. She may be 12, going on 13, but she knew that.   
  
But then, two days after Red celebrated her 13th birthday and received a warm hoodie to wear over the faded and thin sweater, the Arctic Emperor decided that hybrids needed to be put in check.   
  
It started small, curfews and routine house inspections.   
  
It became Red looking out the window to see another person like her being dragged through the streets, crying, and feeling _numb_ due to the normalcy.   
Her childish treatment had never been more useful, none of the guards feeling like cornering and questioning the passive mob hybrid child player.   
The stories she heard were ones of darker stuff, blood crawling out of the cracks in the street, clawing for her pen.   
But then she started hearing a light story, one Red had never, ever, heard before.   
It started with a cry of pain and her ears flew up.   
It was closer than Red expected and her boss’ voice was far too deep to sound like that.   
The basement was usually shut and locked but Red need only press a hand to the door and it swung open.   
That… was new. And possibly dangerous.   
The light turned on with a click of the switch and her life went on a dangerously short path just as fast.   
  
As Red could repeat over and over, there was no hostility for hybrids from her boss. She did not think that meant she’d find three hybrid players in his basement.   
The oldest looking was a Phantom Player, their wings wrapped around an Iron Golem Player and a seemingly normal player.   
They stared at each other, Red’s fur standing on edge on her back. She regretted only wearing her sweater and hoodie.   
Before any of those below could react, Red reached over and turned off the lights once more.   
Upstairs, she gathered any sort of blankets.   
“Boss,” she said, the man still frozen from her journey below and back up again. “We might need to get better insulation. It’s getting into the colder months and the rats might get in.”   
She hurried back downstairs, arms full of blankets. Her boss sighed in relief.   
  
As one of three hybrid players in a small neighborhood in a small kingdom in a hybrid hating empire, Red had not many opportunities speaking to those like herself and learning their stories.   
The Phantom Player was barely 13 themself and didn’t speak english, at least, not to Red, but the Iron Golem Player was extremely willing to share, chattering about the instincts she dealt with and how it affected her life, the hatred she had encountered countless times, anything and everything. Red bought a new notebook to keep it all in the next day.   
She also learned something extremely interesting from the ‘normal’ player.   
There were different types of players! The one she knew was a _Cheats Off_ player, allowing him to ignore any commands issued by an _Admin_ player, a player who could manipulate reality itself and abilities like that of a god.   
The young boy didn’t know many others but he knew about Admins, Cheats Offs, and _Hardcorers_ , players that only had one life.   
Red couldn’t imagine it, the idea that any death, by a bush or a sword between the ribs, could bring the player to a brutal and tragic end. It was terrifying sounding and she wrote it down in her little book.   
She wrote every secret and story they told her in that book.   
Every last one.   
  
When the guards came for her, her lost journal in their hands and swords at their belts, she was twenty blocks from her work.   
Red knew once they had her, they’d go for the three players in the book store basement. She knew what the guards would do when, not if, _when_ , the trio would struggle, memories of Mrs. Thatcher hissing at the guards, green mossy arms wrapped around a sobbing child with bone white skin, her last remnant of her stolen husband. Memories of arrows hitting flesh and a child screaming in terror and heartbreak.   
Red would not allow her friends to suffer the same fate.   
She grabbed a glass bottle of water out of her pocket, slamming on the ground and screaming in the language the phantom girl spoke.   
Red did not know what she said or if her boss heard and took it as the warning it was but the crowd jumped back from Red, crying out she was a witch. Red didn’t care, already running in the opposite direction of the book store and the guards.   
She did something Red Pandas never did; she fought. She clawed and bit and let loose every curse she could think of, becoming the opposite of the submissive passive mob they had believed her to be.   
They dragged her, still screaming, into the palace, handing the journal, her journal, her stories, to the man on the throne. He was not the Emperor but he was the king and he eyed her and the stories in her journal like they were less than dirt.   
He demanded to know who she worked for, who she was recording such secrets to, telling her they’d ease up on her if she did so.   
Red didn’t believe them, she was 14, not stupid, but it’d be funny to send them on a wild goose chase for someone who didn’t exist.   
In the end, she denied having an ulterior motive and spat in the king’s face. She was already dead and, hopefully, the three basement buddies had escaped already. She might as well as have some fun with this.   
  
The end of a spear slammed against her head and the world went dark.   
  
She reawakened in a small cell, heat coming from above her and glass surrounding her. The guard just beyond the glass reading her incredibly small list of rights. She would be allowed to keep her meager belongings, anything she was unable to claim would be given to family. That’s when Red realized she was gonna be executed. She was gonna be executed without even a trial, in front of who knows how many people and was probably gonna be locked up for the rest of her lives.   
  
Everyone was spawned with three lives. You could lose them for a number of reasons, mostly traumatic deaths. Old age wasn’t a thing for players, one of the universe’s many gifts, with the balanced curse of the whole world out to get you. You could be spawned mentally and physically 85 and it wouldn’t matter, three lives under your belt to live.   
  
Red knew this was probably to give the players unlimited time to explore the world they’d been given but she never hated the three life system more.   
They were going to kill her. They were going to kill her until she lost one of her lives, maybe more.   
the guard finished reading her rights and, with a bored expression, flicked a lever. Red heard pistons above her head, pointy ears twitching, and didn’t want to look up. She didn’t want to see the lava dripping down.   
Red screamed the minute it touched her ears and kept screaming until she died, completely submerged in the hot magma, refusing to let herself be silenced to the last.   
  
She respawned, as she expected, in a cell. No one came to read her rights now, as she sobbed from the phantom pain. Everyone always said the first death hurt the most and Red could absolutely agree, the burn of the magma still stinging over her fur.   
She waited for someone to come and give some sort of food or ask her more questions but all she got was silence and hunger.   
Had they not expected her to respawn? To let the universe take her in its arms prematurely? No way, there were too many stories left to just dip out now. She’d find a way to hear them, they couldn’t keep her trapped forever.   
  
Right?   
  
Days and nights passed, Red unable to measure or keep track of them, alone in her dark and painfully cold cell. She curled into her hoodie, the only thing around to give her comfort, waiting and watching.   
They had to feed her, right? She wondered, as her stomach sent another painful jolt through her weakening body. There was no reason to keep her here and starve her.   
They had to feed her. They had to.   
  
When Red died the second time, she waited in that void for a second, knowing that was indeed her second official death. 14 years old and she had already lost both lives, both to the cruelty of those in charge of her. She was so tired already of being scared and tired and hungry. What if she went back and it was just that again? She couldn’t handle that, not again.   
_Please not again,_ she pleaded with whoever was listening as she respawned, the pain of starvation aching throughout her body again before it finally faded.   
It took her so many days but the door finally gave a last shudder before falling, allowing her to step out, one cautious paw after another. 

Red rubbed her aching and probably bruised shoulder before running, eager to leave.   
The prison she was in seemed small, the door visible once she ran past 3 empty cells. Was she alone in this place or did they just keep the other prisoners further in? She did not know nor did she care, she just wanted out.   
The door slammed open and she kept running, only stopping once she realized…   
“It’s snowing?” Red questioned with a whisper. How far from home was she? It never snowed this heavily back home.   
Red shook her head, marching forward away from the prison. It didn’t matter if she was freezing, snow beneath her bare feet as she shoved her already cold body through the slowly growing blizzard. She had to check on her boss, make sure he and the basement trio had gotten away safely.   
Did Red know she was shuffling forwards towards her death? Yes. Did she really care? As long as it wasn’t in that awful cell, no.   
The snow dragged her down, caking around her knees. The snowflakes were slamming into her face like rocks, almost pushing her thin and weak body backwards.   
When she finally fell, it was with a yelp she could barely hear herself.   
She lay in the snow, slowly getting more tired and yet less cold. Red didn’t think that was a good thing.   
She didn’t wanna die. There were so many stories to hear and to see and to tell, she didn’t wanna die.   
She didn’t wanna die, repeated in her head as her eyes slid close.   
_I don’t want to die._   
  
And then she woke up.   
  
  
  
  
Philza’s weathered hands grazed the spines of the books, frowning at the hidden histories and stories only now at his fingertips.

His hands stopped on a weathered notebook and he pulled it free from the masses, its pages old looking and faded but he could tell it was more from mistreatment than age.   
His shadowed gaze scanned over the words, them shifting from an excited child’s scrawl to the more elegant scribblings of a young person eager to share something with the world. The notebook was too full for its skin and he wondered if it had once been two, not one.   
He smiled as the words told him of a young girl meeting others like her, at her age, for the first time and the kinship that rose from it. It almost seemed like the young hybrid was there, telling him this all to his face, her hands moving in that excitable manner, like his son, Wilbur.   
He frowned at how the stories never reached a conclusion and he hoped the girl had had to leave it to flee, instead of the gruesome fate he heard many a hybrid had suffered under the previous ruler’s command.   
He closed the journal gently, trying to give it the kindness he would never be able to give the owner.   
Perhaps, Wilbur would enjoy it.

**Author's Note:**

> i swear this stuff is gonna come into play soon, i am posting this at 11:06 on 2.6.21, i am going to finish the next chapter soon, i swear it,


End file.
